The strange repercussions of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict

Unfortunately this conflict is creating waves and more anger in places that I would never expect to see it. To be clear, I have no position on the conflict other than no one will win, and that every life lost is a terrible thing.

For those of you who may not know what PHP is, PHP is a language used to develop web applications in. Whether you know it or not, you are using it right now: DU runs on PHP. I personally use PHP to develop applications as well. In fact PHP is one of the most widely used web languages in the world. What many people don't realize is that most PHP today runs on something called the Zend Engine. The Zend engine is developed by Zend Technologies, originally an Israeli company. That's where it's gotten sticky lately.

Jani Taskinen aka Sniper has long been involved in the development of the Zend engine and many other aspect of the PHP language (PECL/PEAR etc). Recently he quit. Evidently the Israeli association of PHP was to much for him. A link to this story was posted on Slashdot, a well known geek community. It did not take long for the Slashdot thread to devolve into the kind of thread that we see here all the time. Israel is evil, Hezbollah is evil, the US is evil, bomb, nuke, kill, and so forth. Now Slashdot is known for it's flame fests, but almost all consist of what most people would view as uber-nerd wars over which language is better, whether Intel or AMD rocks harder, who's cuter: Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But to see a Slashdot thread devolve into chaos like that is troublesome to me. It seems like you can't turn anywhere without seeing more splits, more fighting, more finger wagging over this issue.

Jani quit because evidently he served as a UN peacekeeper himself and was outraged over the bombing, accidental or not, of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Here is a sample of his venting caught by a slashdot user (mcavanagh2):


This is pretty extreme emotion. Its also pretty extreme to disassociate oneself from a global open source community dedicated to a programming language because the core engine was once Israeli based (it is now based in California, though it maintains offices in Israel). You may wonder why I'm going on about this. It's because he worked on a tremendous number of features in PHP, including security features and the Zend Engine itself (he was listed as one of the leads on the new Zend Engine). His lost will drastically slow down development of bug fixes and security patches in a number of areas of PHP, as other developers will have to take on his workload, learn his code. This also may leave larger gaps of time open when web servers are vulnerable to attacks before patches are released. And that affects you the user as well as business in general. I know this might affect me as all our software is based on PHP and relies heavy on many extensions he worked on.

And that's what gets me, that if this conflict is profoundly affecting a programming language and its community, what other areas of commerce, in what other ways that I may not be aware of is this conflict snapping ties? I can't even begin to imagine the damage this is causing as various groups world wide react, move to distance themselves from each other, or cut off business entirely! In what ways am I not even aware of is this horrible business affecting me?

In what way is this affecting you that your not even aware of?

...the "lock and load" absolutism favoring one side or the other...

More of the "collateral damage" of war...

I appreciate you taking the time.

amongst relatives. Can't talk politics and can't talk peace.

It's becoming increasingly hard to find common ground out there, anywhere.